I’ve been building my wikibus.org code on AppVeyor, which is quite neat and used it to publish over WebDeploy to my VPS. Having recently watched a convincing presentation about Heroku on Wrocław .NET User Group I decided that maybe it will be an interesting experience.

First let’s find a mono buildpack

For those who don’t know Heroku, it’s a cloud hosting platform with support for anything really. It works by creating Ubuntu a deployment image called a dyno, which can be bootstrapped with any technology stack. The bootstrapping is done by setting up the process with a buildpack. There are a number of buildpacks available for a number of languages out of the box: Java, node.js, Python, Ruby, etc.

Unfortunately, for obvious reasons, there isn’t an official package for .NET or mono. An exception is a new ASP.NET 5. There are however quite a few buildpacks for .NET. This didn’t come as a surprise. After all the online community proves very resourceful .

There is however comes another catch - I use Paket instead of NuGet Package Manager. I figured, meh, I’ll just fork a buildpack - preferably a one with recent mono, like version 4+ and just customize it to use Paket instead. So I went with a buildpack by Adam Burgess and adjusted the bash script…

Mono isn’t as ready as I’d hoped for

And it doesn’t work. It seems that mono 4.2, or whatever version the buildpack currently uses has some issues with ssl certificates. I tried various remedies and I kept getting weird errors whenever Paket tried to do some network activity over https.

So I though, okay maybe I can try another buildpack, which uses an older version of mono. There is actually one already set up with Paket. I did some tweaks, so that it plays nicer with my repository, and now the solution won’t build!

LibGit2Sharp native libraries don’t work on mono:

Error executing task Zoltu.Versioning.GitTask: An exception was thrown by the type initializer for LibGit2Sharp.Core.NativeMethods

This one is Resourcer.Fody misbehaving:

Fody: Could not find a resource.

And I also had issues with referencing assemblies. Enough of that.

How about I deploy a pre-built package?

Who said I had to build the entire solution on Heroku? I already use AppVeyor to build an run test, so maybe I could just package all projects as nupkgs and deploy just a simple OWIN self-hosted application?

Stay tuned, I’ll come back when that’s ready